Tools, culture and aesthetics – The art of DevOps

“Culture is not important, but shared aesthetic is crucial” is the formula that J. Paul Reed follows for finding out what DevOps means to companies of all shapes and sizes. In his DevOpsCon 2015 Keynote in Munich, he hones in on what exactly that formula entails.

As we pass the six year anniversary of the naming of that Thing™ we now know as DevOps, a curious puzzle remains in the forefront of practitioners‘ minds: organisations from ten-person startups to multinational enterprises continue to wrestle with what DevOps means, what it looks like, what behaviours it entails, and fundamentally, how to consistently implement it successfully.

For every case study of the storied “unicorn companies,” there exist numerous counterexamples of teams in the trenches, struggling to fit the elusive pieces of “tools and culture” together in a coherent way.

In this talk, J. Paul Reed will examine why these now school-aged ideals remain so difficult to implement, explore why DevOps is often described as “the movement that refuses to identify itself,” and what your team can do to confront the dichotomies they are likely to face as they transform how they, their colleagues, and their company go about their daily work.

Reed approaches the issue of what exactly is meant by “culture” in DevOps by shifting the emphasis away from culture towards a common aesthetic, meant in its original meaning as Aisthesis, “perception” or “sensation”. If you’re asking Reed what defines DevOps, expect answers such as automation, Infrastructure as Code, system thinking, feedback loops, cooperation and empathy to find a broader consensus on the topic.